The nations of Central and Eastern Europe experienced a time of momentous change in the period following the Second World War. The vast majority were subject to Communism and central planning while events such as the Hungarian uprising and Prague Spring stood out as key watershed moments against a distinct social, cultural and political backcloth. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, German reunification and the break-up of the Soviet Union, changes from the 1990s onwards have also been momentous with countries adjusting to various capitalist realities. The volumes in this series will help shine a light on the experiences of this key geopolitical zone with many lessons to be learned for the future.
By David A. Norris
March 05, 2024
This volume focuses on Serbia’s need to manage change while preserving community identities, a narrative that avoids the common depiction of Serbian culture as a hostile struggle between modernizers supporting foreign models and traditionalists advocating forms of national cultural patrimony. ...
By Tomaž Ivešić
March 05, 2024
The Rise and Fall of Communist Yugoslavism: Soft Nation-Building in Yugoslavia examines how the Communist Party of Yugoslavia incorporated the idea of a Yugoslav nation into their ideology and created the Yugoslav Soft Nation-Building project after the Second World War. With an innovative approach ...
By Gintarė Malinauskaitė
February 20, 2024
This volume aims to newly evaluate the Soviet war crimes trials of Holocaust perpetrators, their representation through various means of media, and their reception in the context of the Cold War. By examining the 1964 Klaipėda war crimes trial in Soviet Lithuania through a microhistorical ...
By Dina Khapaeva
October 26, 2023
Two decades before the war against Ukraine, a “special operation” was launched against Russian historical memory, aggressively reshaping the nation’s understanding of its history and identity. The Kremlin’s militarization of Russia through World War II propaganda is well documented, but the ...
By Jakub Tyszkiewicz
September 29, 2023
This volume analyzes US policy toward communist-ruled Poland in the fields of diplomacy, economy, culture, and public diplomacy. It highlights the limitations in developing cooperation between democratic and nondemocratic countries resulting from the Cold War conflict. No comprehensive account of ...
By Alexis Heraclides, Ylli Kromidha
September 28, 2023
This book is a comprehensive study of more than 200 years of the shared and interconnected histories of Greek-Albanian relations, a field of inquiry that has not attracted the international scholarly attention it deserves. The book presents and analyses in detail topics including the contested ...
By Maria Bucur
September 25, 2023
A pioneering work for the history of veterans’ rights in Romania, this study brings into focus the laws and policies the state developed in response to the unprecedented human losses in World War I. It features in lively and accessible language the varied responses of veterans, widows and orphans ...
By David R. Shearer
September 11, 2023
Stalin and War, 1918-1953 is the first book to examine the patterns of radicalized internal violence that characterized the Stalinist regime across the whole of the dictator’s rule, and it is one of the only works to connect patterns of internal violence to the dictator’s perceptions of war and ...
Edited
By Motoki Nomachi, Tomasz Kamusella
September 01, 2023
This volume probes into the mechanisms of how languages are created, legitimized, maintained, or destroyed in the service of the extant nation-states across Central Europe. Through chapters from contributors in North America, Europe, and Asia, the book offers an interdisciplinary introduction to ...
Edited
By József Ö. Kovács, Gergely Krisztián Horváth, Gábor Csikós
June 05, 2023
In this book the experiential history of the Soviet-style social transformation projects between 1945 and 1980 is discussed through the example of rural Hungary. The book interprets state socialism as a (modernization) project. Existing socialism was a form of dictatorship in which authorities ...
By Emil Brix, Erhard Busek
May 31, 2023
More than 30 years after their momentous book "Projekt Mitteleuropa", which had been written before the fall of the Iron Curtain, Emil Brix and Erhard Busek revisit the political space between Germany, Russia and the Mediterranean. The volume explores the role of Central Europe in the 21st century...
Edited
By Adam Hudek, Michal Kopeček, Jan Mervart
May 31, 2023
This collection systematically approaches the concept of Czechoslovakism and its historical progression, covering the time span from the mid-nineteenth century to Czechoslovakia’s dissolution in 1992/1993, while also providing the most recent research on the subject. "Czechoslovakism" was a ...